> We rarely get out of the coding question block. It's a fairly simple question that ChatGPT solves easily.

well I guess now we know why its all so brutal. We are being compared to a state of the art AI. Also we gotta have a compiler installed on our heads. That aside, if you are a hiring manager, ask yourself what your company really needs. Because this format of interview is so outdated, its insane.

I'm reading it totally differently. I've been giving an interview in a similar vein, and for years have been an outspoken opponent of leetcode for exactly what this interviewer is explaining.

We have a proper domain-specific programming test in the later stages of our pipeline, so my phone screen is a smoke test I expect most devs to complete in 10 minutes (we give the full 30 just in case).

We talk through a simple word problem, and at no point do I even require it to compile because I understand that not having your coding development environment choice can throw you off. At most if I spot an obvious syntax error I'll nudge to make sure they spot it and move on.

- Yet the feedback I get is extremely bi-modal: People who write code for a living love it. They had mentally prepped for inverting binary trees while some CS-guru stares them down over Zoom, so having a collaborative problem that takes the same mental process your day to day does is great for them.

But for people who have hyper-optimized for leetcode, it's like their brains shut down. Simple problems they should be able to solve with basic control flow suddenly become these insurmountable wall because they can't pattern match against something they memorized.

I mean, I sure hope any junior intern developer is better than ChatGPT at writing actually working code. Converting from one language to another of a solution that exists in its knowledge base is not how one should program.